{"pk":49894,"title":"Written in Stone: Lay intuitions about the emergence of formal rules","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Humans navigate social life through shared expectations that guide behavior. Some expectations become formalized into explicit rules, but little is known about people's intuitions regarding why and when rules become formal. Across three experiments with U.S. adults, we examined these intuitions. Participants consistently predicted that formal rules would arise in contexts involving internal coordination challenges (e.g., large or diverse groups), but not in contexts involving external threats (e.g., natural disasters, resource scarcity). In Experiment 2, participants judged formal rules more likely when defiance or costly violations were expected—but these beliefs did not explain when participants actually inferred formalization. In Experiment 3, expectations of formality were better predicted by perceived group dynamics: low interpersonal closeness and high disagreement (\"quibbling\"). These dynamics predicted formality more strongly than concerns about defiance, ignorance, or cost. Our findings suggest that people see formalization less as a mechanism for enforcing norms, and more as a strategy for managing group interaction dynamics.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Cognitive development; Development; Representation; Social cognition; Developmental analysis; Statistics; Survey"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8tf7j3v5","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Hannah","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hok","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Ashley","middle_name":"J","last_name":"Thomas","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Rebecca","middle_name":"","last_name":"Saxe","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49894/galley/37856/download/"}]}